The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War

By Stephen C. Murray

An engrossing account of the military, cultural, and commercial impact of Japan and the USA on the island nation of Palau

The expansionist Japanese empire annexed the inhabited archipelago of Palau in 1914. The airbase built on Peleliu Island became a target for attack by the United States in World War II. The Battle over Peleliu:  Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War offers an ethnographic study of how Palau and Peleliu were transformed by warring great powers and further explores how their conflict is remembered differently by the three peoples who shared that experience.
 
Author Stephen C. Murray uses oral histories from Peleliu’s elders to reconstruct the island’s prewar way of life, offering a fascinating explanation of the role of land and place in island culture. To Palauans, history is conceived geographically, not chronologically. Land and landmarks are both the substance of history and the mnemonic triggers that recall the past. Murray then offers a detailed account of the 1944 US invasion against entrenched Japanese forces on Peleliu, a seventy-four-day campaign that razed villages, farms, ancestral cemeteries, beaches, and forests, and with them, many of the key nodes of memory and identity.
 
Murray also explores how Islanders’ memories of the battle as shattering their way of life differ radically from the ways Japanese and Americans remember the engagement in their histories, memoirs, fiction, monuments, and tours of Peleliu. Determination to retrieve the remains of 11,000 Japanese soldiers from the caves of Peleliu has driven high-profile civic groups from across the Japanese political spectrum to the island. Contemporary Japan continues to debate pacifist, right-wing apologist, and other interpretations of its aggression in Asia and the Pacific. These disputes are exported to Peleliu, and subtly frame how Japanese commemoration portrays the battle in stone and ritual. Americans, victors in the battle, return to the archipelago in far fewer numbers. For them, the conflict remains controversial but is most often submerged into the narrative of “the good war.”
 
The Battle over Peleliu is a study of public memory, and the ways three peoples swept up in conflict struggle to create a common understanding of the tragedy they share.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817388898

Book preview

THE BATTLE OVER PELELIU

WAR, MEMORY, AND CULTURE

Series Editor

Steven Trout

Advisory Board

Joan Beaumont

Philip D. Beidler

John Bodnar

Patrick Hagopian

Mara Kozelsky

Edward T. Linenthal

Kendall R. Phillips

Kirk Savage

Jay Winter

Series published in cooperation with

http://www.southalabama.edu/departments/research/warandmemory/

Susan McCready, Content Editor

THE BATTLE OVER PELELIU

ISLANDER, JAPANESE, AND AMERICAN MEMORIES OF WAR

STEPHEN C. MURRAY

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: The Bai ra Ngermelulau in Ngerdelolk, Peleliu, 1936. Kondo, Micronesian Expedition, Bishop Museum, Honolulu; CN 18835.

Cover design: Kyle Anthony Clark

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murray, Stephen C., 1945–

The battle over Peleliu : islander, Japanese, and American memories of war / Stephen C. Murray.

pages cm. — (War, memory, and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1884-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8889-8 (e book) 1. Peleliu, Battle of, Palau, 1944. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Palau—Peleliu Island. 3. Collective memory—Palau—Peleliu Island. 4. Historic sites—Palau—Peleliu Island—Conservation and restoration. 5. Peleliu Island—Social life and customs. 6. Peleliu Island—History. 7. Japan—Relations—Palau. 8. Palau—Relations—Japan. 9. United States—Relations—Palau. 10. Palau—Relations—United States. I. Title.

D767.99.P4M87   2016

940.54’2666—dc23

2015022948

This book is dedicated to the three women who considered me a son:

Barbara Curran Murray Henderson,

1919–1992,

Seattle and Bainbridge Island, Washington,

my mother;

Olga Davis Murray,

Sausalito, California, and Kathmandu, Nepal,

my stepmother; and

Aliil Betok Nakamura,

1909–1988,

Ngerchol, Beliliou, Belau,

my Palauan mother.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. PALAUAN AND COLONIAL LANDSCAPES

1. History, Memory, and Island Landscapes

2. Colonial Masters and Island Society

PART II. PEACE, WAR, AND A NEW EMPIRE

3. Smiling Sky, Gathering Clouds

4. War

5. Exile, Fear, and Hunger: Ngaraard, Babeldaob, 1944–1945

6. An Island Desolated, a Trust Betrayed, 1946–1994

PART III. PURSUING MEMORY

7. Retrieving the Dead

8. Remembering a Painful Victory

9. Parallel Histories: Three Peoples’ Memories of War and Loss

Conclusion: The Roots of the Plant

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

1. Palau within the Western Pacific region

2. The archipelago of Palau

3. Micronesia and the central Pacific region

4. Peleliu and its five villages, before construction of the airfield in 1937

5. The prewar village of Ngerkeyukl

6. The American landings on the west coast of Peleliu

FIGURES

1. The Bai ra Ngermelulau in Ngerdelolk, 1936

2. Interior of bai in Melekeok village

3. Palauan house next to an odesongel, 1935–1936

4. Matichau Ilemelong at the site of his village of Ngerkeyukl

5. Women harvesting taro at the Beches el Mesei

6. Tokie Morei of Ngesias

7. Diltpak Merkii Napoleon and Dirribukel Ngirametuker

8. U.S. Marines coming ashore on Ngebedangel (White) Beach

9. Flame in the battle for the ridges

10. The sisters Ungil Besul and Mesiou Matareklai

11. The Odesangel Bad in Ngebuked village of Ngaraard

12. The U.S. Navy base on Peleliu, June 1945

13. Site of the village of Ngerkeyukl, 1968

14. Stephen C. Murray and Professor Iitaka Shingo in the Japanese section of the Ngerchol cemetery

15. The 2002 Shinto shrine and the U.S. Marine Corps monument on Bloody Nose Ridge

16. Peleliu historian Smau Amalei Ngirngesang

Acknowledgments

Throughout this project I received encouragement and sturdy assistance from numerous friends, relatives, and colleagues. I hereby offer them my deepest thanks.

In Palau I received unstinting support from members of my wife’s family and from the various Nakamura families who welcomed back their prodigal brother. I thank Ambassador Daiziro Nakamura, the late speaker Tosiwo Nakamura and his wife, Sabeth, their children, Steven and Imelda, and former president Kuniwo Nakamura for information, suggestions, and hospitality.

I thank the staffs of the library at Palau Community College, the Belau National Museum, the Historic Preservation Office, and the Palau Visitors Authority. Officials at the Bureau of Lands and Surveys helped untangle the difficult subject of land matters. Kyonori Tellames of the Office of Planning and Statistics was generous with census data.

Masaharu Tmodrang, Techetbos William Tabelual, Jonathan Emul, Kathy Kesolei, and Kempis Mad explained Palauan ways of history. On Guam I received hospitality and advice from Professor Dirk Ballendorf and his wife, Francesca. Professor Don Shuster also shared ideas. Nancy Farrell provided helpful information on archaeology and the search for remains.

I am particularly indebted to two Japanese researchers I met in Palau, Iitaka Shingo and Mita Takashi. They shared their knowledge of Japanese history, politics, and wartime memories. Shingo generously translated inscriptions of Japanese monuments and explained their choice of language and subtleties in points of view. Kurata Yoji told me his life story as a scientist and soldier in Palau.

Clearly my deepest gratitude goes to the people of Peleliu and Ngaraard, who shared their private stories so that I could bring them into the public record. On Peleliu I particularly thank Governor Timarong Sisior, Chief Obak Isao Singeo, Chief Uchelsias Etibek Shmull, Chief Obaklechol Ichiro Blesam, and Chief Renguul Donald Haruo for their interviews. Special thanks go to other elder collaborators who shared their pasts at unusual length: Tokie Morei, Lorenza Pedro of Angaur, Reiko Kubary, Spesungel Ichiro Dingilius, Matichau Ilemelong, Dilchuuch Ermang Ngiruous, Olikong ra Tikei Kokichi Ingas, Diltpak Merkii Napoleon, Susong Smau, Dirribukel Ngirametuker, Chief Obak’s father, Singeo, and Peleliu historian Smau Amalei Ngirngesang. Kent Giramur contributed many acute observations concerning tourism on Peleliu today. I received warm family support from Margarete Ichiro, Des Matsutaro and his guide firm, Peleliu Adventures, and from Emaredong. In Ngaraard I am especially indebted to Imelda Blailes, Julius and JeRome Temengil, and the historian Andrew Shiro, who offered invaluable information and advice.

On Peleliu my research assistants and translators, Fuanny Blunt and Bouwel Iekar, helped me in the long and demanding interviews and made important suggestions regarding whom to talk with, what to inquire about, and what to see on the island and elsewhere in the archipelago.

I thank Professor John W. Dower for encouragement and advice, and for introducing me to Professor Franziska Seraphim, who in turn introduced me to the politically charged landscape of Japanese war memory. Her insights framed my understanding of how this disputed memory manifests itself on Peleliu. I am also indebted to Professor Peter Black, a friend from Peace Corps days, who, like Professor Seraphim, read the manuscript with care and made many valuable recommendations. I thank Professors Geoff White and David Hanlon in Hawaii for their support, and the staff of the National Park Service in Honolulu. Nico Tripcevich produced the maps of Palau and Peleliu. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues in Santa Barbara who discussed the project and read drafts: Mike Jochim, David Cleveland, Don Brown, and A. F. Sandy Robertson. The staff at University of Alabama Press, including Dan Waterman, Joanna Jacobs, J. D. Wilson, and Susan Harris, were helpful and professional at every step.

I was buoyed by the continuous interest in the project shown by a lifelong friend of my parents who became family, E. M. Mac Gardiner. My two sons, Sean Henderson Murray and Colin Umerang Murray, showed patience for and understanding of my reasons for pursuing the research. I thank my wife’s elder sister, Meikam Chin Weers, of Peleliu and Melekeok, for decades of conversations about Palau’s past, present, and future.

I could not have managed this project without the love, assistance, and encouragement I received from my wife, Hirmina (Fermina) Brel Murray, of Melekeok, Palau. Hirm acted as my chief source of information on all things Palauan, coached me in cultural matters, ran the household during my lengthy absences, read and critiqued my drafts, challenged my preconceptions, nursed me in illness, and nudged me tactfully when I bogged down.

Introduction

My connection with Peleliu began in 1966 when I joined the first Peace Corps program to deploy to the Palau Islands in the western Pacific. I was adopted by a woman from Peleliu Island, Aliil Betok Nakamura. Since Palau follows matrilineal descent, I became a person of Peleliu as well. We lived 25 miles north of the island, in Palau’s urban capital of Koror. I knew that a fierce battle had occurred on Peleliu in 1944 between American invaders and Japanese defenders, but nothing could have prepared me for what I found on my first visit to the island. Everywhere beneath its regrown forests and small gardens, even 23 years after the battle, lay rusted guns, smashed planes, caves filled with weapons and human skeletons, countless tons of unexploded ordnance, and shattered buildings. This was no Civil War battleground of well-groomed fields and orchards with winding paths, stone markers, rows of crosses, guides, museums, and bookstores. It was a raw and grisly battlefield, and it was hard to imagine what forces brought Japan and the United States to expend the lives of 12,600 men and vast wealth in a struggle over an island that they both had now abandoned and, it seemed, forgotten entirely.

At that time Peleliu had only a few memorials raised by American soldiers in the aftermath of the battle. Starting in the late 1960s, however, Japanese citizens began coming to Peleliu in a steady stream to comb its shorelines and mountains for remains of their fighting men, and to erect monuments around the island. Over the years both Japanese and American veterans and historians published many historical works telling their particular versions of the battle. However, with few exceptions, the visitors to Peleliu and their historiographies share the same trait: they focus obsessively on their own war stories and concerns and completely ignore the residents of Peleliu, the third people caught up in the maelstrom of the battle, as if their history has no importance.

The Palauans most definitely have their own memories and tales to tell, versions of the past that are fascinating and affecting. They are maintained as oral histories by the elders who lived through the turbulent decades of the midcentury. But few of these stories had been written down by the early 2000s, and the numbers of elders were being thinned rapidly by time. With the opportunity to record their experiences slipping away, I undertook writing this book in order to capture as many of their oral recollections as possible. Most people I spoke with voiced their concerns that the old stories were not being passed down to the younger generations and that they needed to be preserved in writing.

The Pacific War, however, was only the violent climax to an imperial rivalry between Japan and the United States that dated to the early 20th century. Japan ruled and colonized the Micronesian islands of the Pacific (including Palau) from 1914 until losing them to the United States in 1945. America’s conquests from 1898 had left it in possession of a Pacific empire that included Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, and other small but valuable islands. The victory over Japan won the United States undisputed dominance throughout the Pacific Rim. America viewed the strategically placed islands of Micronesia as vital to its postwar position and administered them as a de facto colony for 50 years. The United States retained vital powers over the various island governments that evolved in Micronesia during the 1980s and 1990s. The imperial aims of these two great powers have now shaped Palauans’ lives for a full century.

Thus, as the first goal of the book, I asked Peleliu’s elders to help me document their own distinctive experiences, memories, and judgments across these decades of colonial rule, war, and foreign intrusions into their way of life. The results occupy parts I and II. Besides preserving remembrance, these parts of the book argue that the history of the violent clash on Peleliu remains incomplete until careful consideration is given to its impacts on the native inhabitants of the island. I present the prewar way of life of the people of Peleliu in detail in order to give the reader a sense of what they lost from foreign rule and the cataclysm of 1944. The book describes the islanders’ kin-based social and political system, the subsistence economy built on fishing and farming, social relations, and the steady encroachment of Japanese power in the 1930s. The story continues with the people’s wartime hardships: first their exile from Peleliu, then their shock at its devastated condition after the fighting and their frustrated efforts to rebuild their lives while adjusting to American rule. The battle obliterated the way of life that had sustained Peleliu’s inhabitants for 3,000 years.

Palauans’ views of Japanese and American colonial rule, the war, and of history itself are radically different from those of the two combatants. On Peleliu scarce land is the key subsistence asset, but it also plays multiple cultural roles. Personal identity flows from a family lineage that is defined by the lands it controls. History is conceived geographically, as movements of people among islands and across landscapes, and how they obtained land. Lands and landmarks serve as prompts of memory for the oral stories that make up local history. For the islanders, then, the invasion’s destruction of the villages, farms, cemeteries holding the ancestors, and other landforms demolished not only productive assets but also the roots of identity and much of the means of memory and history. The different ways various people—native residents, colonial occupiers, combatants, tourists, developers—have looked upon and used the lands and seas of Palau and Peleliu through time is a recurring theme within the book.

In Japan, memories of World War II are fiercely debated, with the political Left criticizing the nation’s role as aggressor, while the Right excuses Japanese expansion and denies charges of atrocities.¹ The book finds that well-organized private interest groups from across the political spectrum export to Peleliu the contentious war memories that roil Japanese domestic politics. Since they encounter no resistance or regulation within Peleliu or Palau, the clashing viewpoints are put on remarkable and revealing display in the texts of monuments, in disputes over the search for remains, and in ceremonies devoted to commemoration and imperial nostalgia.

American memory of World War II has been less politicized and less troubled. The conflict still tends to be recalled as the Good War, which America fought for a just cause (in response to unprovoked attack), while using legitimate means (including the atomic bomb) to end the war as quickly as possible. Peleliu’s few American monuments proclaim our national memory of the Pacific War: a righteous victory won against a determined foe in a hostile tropical environment. Over the years historical studies have tried, with limited success, to cast doubt on this comfortable national narrative, questioning American strategy, the weapons employed, and failures of campaign leadership. In particular, certain battles have received close and critical examination. Peleliu is prominent among them. The United States now remembers the 74-day struggle for Peleliu for its ferocity, but also for its many lingering controversies: whether the battle was necessary, American intelligence faulty, and the marines’ leadership incompetent and wasteful of lives. In many American war histories, Peleliu has become a symbol of battles gone wrong.

These sharply conflicting public memories, involving one people from the Pacific Islands, one from Asia, and a third from the West, call for explicit examination and comparison. This is the book’s second goal, which occupies part III. Parts I and II reconstruct the islanders’ lives and experiences in the wartime era. Part III then contrasts how the people of Peleliu remember and understand this era with the ways the Japanese and Americans treat it through their tours of Peleliu, their public commemorations and ceremonies, and the monuments they raise on the island. The analysis continues further by examining the two foreigners’ published histories, memoirs, fiction, and documentaries of the battle, which, by sheer weight and volume overwhelm the voices of the islanders.

Even 70 years after the battle, Japanese and Americans drawn to the story of Peleliu have not yet broadened their awareness to include adequate consideration of the island’s native people. The triangulations within part III, then, reveal the incompatibility of the memories, and how the combatants’ narrowly focused histories and perspectives impede the three peoples from exchanging and revising their war stories and judgments—a failure that has delayed their finding mutual consolation within a more complete appreciation of the tragedy they all share and mourn.

Notes on Terms and Usage

Please refer to the glossary for pronunciations and definitions of Palauan and Japanese terms.

For inhabitants of Peleliu I use the Palauan term chad ra Beliliou (literally people of Peleliu) or the terms islanders or natives, believing that by employing the last as a legitimate synonym for indigenous we can remove its pejorative connotations.

I have taken the spelling of the five traditional villages on Peleliu (Ngerdelolk, Ngesias, Ngerchol, Ngerkeyukl, and Teliu) from a tourist brochure created by the islanders. It breaks with the standard orthography by using the letter y in Ngerkeyukl, rather than Ngerkiukl.

Originally four major groups of islands were included in the area of the central Pacific called Micronesia. Today’s nation of Kiribati was formerly called the Gilbert Islands. As a British colony they followed a history different from the other three groups. When Spain lost its hold on the Marianas and Carolines in 1898, the remaining three Micronesian chains—the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands—became a single colonial entity that passed from Germany (1898–1914) to Japan (as a mandate under the League of Nations from 1919–45) to the United States (as a Trust Territory under the United Nations, from 1947 until various groupings achieved independence, with Palau the last in 1994). The exception was Guam, in the Marianas, which became a U.S. territory in 1898 and remains so today. Palau is usually considered to lie within the Western Caroline Islands. Palauans number about 25,000, but between 5,000 and 10,000 reside outside the archipelago at any given time.

At the start of the 21st century, the Marianas other than Guam (principally Rota, Saipan, and Tinian) form the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, CNMI, a commonwealth under the United States. Yap, Chuuk (formerly Truk), Pohnpei (formerly Ponape), and Kosrae (formerly Kusaie) constitute a sovereign state, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). The Republic of Palau (ROP) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) are also sovereign states, and like the FSM are members of the United Nations. All three nations have special political relationships with the United States. Under compacts of free association, the United States enjoys certain actual or potential military privileges in return for providing defense and generous financial assistance. Additional details on Palau’s current government and its arrangements with the United States appear in chapter 6.

Both male and female Palauan elders can hold chiefly titles. Ichiro Blesam, my Palauan uncle, carried the title Obaklechol, and so I refer to him as Obaklechol Ichiro Blesam. The first-ranked titleholders in each of the five villages I refer to as Chief. With Japanese names I place the family name first and given name second, unless the person expressed a different preference. The many Palauans of Japanese ancestry who have retained the Japanese family name follow the Western pattern of placing it second.

Distances are given in statute miles.

I

PALAUAN AND COLONIAL LANDSCAPES

1

History, Memory, and Island Landscapes

The ideal (although seldom-achieved) Western model of history—as truth seeking, public and accessible, unlimited in scope, nourished by open debate, and largely chronological—fits uncomfortably with the ways most Pacific Islanders approach the subject. Islander history operates primarily at the local level, relating family, clan, or village histories. Such kin-oriented stories are exclusive, not inclusive, and in societies like Palau are considered to be confidential, not public. Islander history is frequently political and tendentious. Among the most important family stories or genealogies, for example, are those that explain membership in a particular lineage or clan, or that justify a family’s possession of valuable lands or chiefly titles. Because the histories are political, they remain partial, in both senses of the word. No more of a story is released than is necessary, and stories are told with bias, to support a position. Western history telling can also be highly politicized, of course, but islanders seem to take for granted that a primary function of history is to justify power and ownership.¹

Although growing amounts of island knowledge have been reduced to writing, either by native or outside scholars, island societies maintain their knowledge by a variety of traditional means as well. Most prominent are oral stories, but songs, dances, chants, carvings and artwork, legends and myths are all still widely used.

Palauans have created written histories, notably in a series of pamphlets from their Historic Preservation Office, based on interviews with elders on topics like traditional medicine and leadership. Palauan authors have also produced history texts for schools and compiled volumes of legends. The deepest and most important family stories, however, are still maintained and transmitted orally. As traditional bai, structures where the council of village chiefs meets, are gradually rebuilt, their gables and interior tie beams are carved and painted with important legends specific to the village, as was done in the past. Elders can then decode and explain the meaning of the artwork to the young (see figures 1 and 2). Some of the oldest knowledge is retained in the chesols, chants performed by men and women of advanced age and rank. In 2003 a segment of Peleliu’s wartime history was presented at Palau’s annual fair in a dance with singing performed by the island’s women.

In Palau, a tightly knit, kin-based society, history is more about human relationships and individual events than about pageants of sweeping change. There are few real national stories. Palau was always divided into villages (beluu) and these continue to be, along with one’s lineage and clan, primary loci of identity and loyalty. Most oral histories therefore focus at the local and family level. The stories I gathered on Peleliu were a mix of public ones that told versions of the prewar and wartime period known to all, and more private and personal versions of events as experienced by the speaker and his family. I did not seek, and was seldom given, deeper more sensitive stories, the kelulau (whispers) that are closely guarded. I interviewed 90 people altogether, 49 from Peleliu, of whom I considered 28 to be elders—that is, born before 1935, which placed the youngest of them in their mid-60s at the time of my primary fieldwork in 2002–3.

Stories carried in memory and related orally can readily be altered to suit changed circumstances. Palauans live comfortably with multiple versions of stories, of history. It is accepted that a tale will likely contain spin. There may be no definitive version of any one of them, but within a locality you will be urged to identify and query the high-ranking elders who hold the key knowledge.

People do not try to distill a final consensus from these rival stories. Beches Iluches Reksid, a titled rubak from the village of Ngaraard, told me he appreciated my gathering the war stories from many different persons. This way, he said, I would have enough versions to create a composite view of the subject that would be as accurate as could be hoped for. The expectation, then, is not for agreement among competing variants; it is rather for completeness, with the understanding that ultimate harmony of opinion will remain elusive.

Palauans treat the knowledge and histories of others with circumspection. They shun direct conflict and confrontation in all aspects of their lives, and normally this discourages challenging others’ stories. A group’s history is their business. Consequently, the chad ra Beliliou grant Japanese and American visitors the freedom to tell their versions of the war in books, stone, and ceremony and avoid publicly judging or criticizing such versions.

The connections between history and geography are crucial. As Kathy Kesolei explained to me in an interview, Palauan history is peoples’ history as structured by land, with group (not individual) identities at the center. Land and place, she went on, organize history and confer meaning on it. Karen Nero is correct in saying that the most important dimension to a Palauan sense of history is spatial, geographical. Palauan histories or legends recount movement through space, through particular geographical places.

It is the same for people, conceived in their group identities. Histories of clans recount their migrations throughout Palau and ties they established while traveling. Once a group settles, then place and landscape become fixed dimensions, culturally marked space that is used as a mnemonic device for decoding the stories attached to it.² The places will be given names, and a lineage or clan will take its basic identity from these named lands and features within a particular village. These may be gardens, mesei (taro patches), beachfront, burial grounds, or home plots. These lands and how the group stakes its claim to them represent the most vital portions of its history. Said Kesolei, "A mesei is treasured as an heirloom to be passed down. Stories always come with it—how it reached your hands."

Glenn Petersen says of Micronesian society in general, Embedded in each plot of land, then, is not simply a material source of survival, but a specific history of personal relationships. Loss of such a plot is more than a threat to the group’s livelihood. It is simultaneously a threat to the group’s social existence and to its status as part of the community, society, and culture.³

The islanders of Palau and Micronesia are hardly unique in the way their landscape continues to be an important repository of the human past. Any settled people who derive subsistence from lands that they have occupied for centuries and who rely on oral traditions rather than written history to transmit their pasts can be expected to intimately know and name land, value it above other possessions, encode stories in it, and use landmarks as mnemonic aids.⁴

In Palau, natural or man-made objects—stones, trees, bead money, titles, burial sites, a tridacna clam shell—frequently serve as aids to prompt recollection of important stories. These aids are called olangch. Examples of American olangch would include Plymouth Rock, the Liberty Bell, Bowdoin College’s dormitory named for one of its graduates, the Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, and almost any statue in a public space.⁵

Kathy Kesolei explained that there were traditionally three elements to a Palauan historical account: the story itself; a chant of it (the chesols) or perhaps a common saying; and the place where it happened, or its associated physical evidence, its olangch. Usually the meaning and importance of an olangch has to be learned from a knowledgeable elder who is qualified to explain it (a further discussion of olangch is found in Parmentier).⁶

The rubak Masaharu Tmodrang described to me the vital connections between migrations, land, olangch, and the burial of ancestors: Most migration stories [for villages in Koror and Babeldaob] tell how people came from Angaur or Peleliu. Our family has names of places that our ancestors went to and named; these were olangch. Among the most important of olangch are the stone burial platforms called odesongel, where kin groups buried important members (see figure 3). "With no writing system, our ancestors used olangch to describe where they first arrived. It’s a much stronger story if you can name the chutem [land parcel] you landed on; and stronger still if you have an odesongel with ancestors buried there."

The subjects of land, olangch, and burials will appear frequently in this work because they structure so many of the observations and memories that the Palauans shared. For the chad ra Beliliou, land provided their subsistence, the ordering of their society, and much of their identity. The war’s devastation of lands was therefore a multifaceted and incalculable loss. For the islanders prior to World War II, their lands, olangch, and memories served the functions largely performed by books, archives, and museums in societies that rely on written language. So damage to the landscape on Peleliu resulted in damage to the means of memory and, hence, to the people’s grip on their past.

For foreigners, land on the island was very different. It had economic or military value, and today is sought for either recreation or for preserving wartime history. Nonetheless, for some returned war veterans or committed history buffs, particular portions of the landscape can acquire the kind of personal, historical value that they do for Palauan natives in other contexts—finding a bunker the vet had destroyed or the hill where a memorable assault occurred. Most people in Palau view memorials raised by the foreigners as a form of outsiders’ olangch. Islanders spoke frequently of the bonds formed when one kin group has to bury a member in lands of another. Burials and the recovery of remains of their own dead servicemen have also motivated both Japanese and American travelers who have come to Palau and Peleliu; and they remain a source of friction to this day.

As Western historians have turned their attention to the study of public memory, examining which persons and events receive public commemoration and celebration, and how and why these emerge while others are overlooked or suppressed, they found some of their most fertile ground in the study of the great wars of the 20th century.⁷ The scale of these cataclysms, their costs in lives and treasure, and the intensity of national mobilizations gave their participants, from the nation-state down to the foot soldier, pressing reasons to want to proclaim and justify their various roles.⁸

By the late 20th century, historians also began to shed long-standing biases against eyewitness accounts of events, recognizing instead the value of the immediacy and details that oral histories and life stories can uniquely provide. The memories of veterans of World War II and the survivors of the Holocaust came to be seen as historical repositories that would soon be gone. James E. Young argues for the joining of historical analysis with personal memory. What seems to be missing is history-telling that includes both the voice of the historian and the memory of survivors, commentary and overt interpretation of events that deepen the historical record. He also believes that memorial forms like monuments and ceremonies can add a unique element to historic understandings. We achieve better results, he says, if we "add the study of commemorative forms to the study of history, making historical inquiry the combined study of both what happened and how it is passed down to us."⁹

Paul Connerton reminds us that oral history offers the possibility of rescuing from silence the history and culture of subordinate groups. Oral histories seek to give voice to what would otherwise remain voiceless even if not traceless, by reconstituting the life histories of individuals.¹⁰ Oral accounts from the chad ra Beliliou therefore become the best means of inserting their experiences, previously missing, into the history of the Pacific War.

There is a confluence here of academic theorizing and indigenous practice. The people of Palau have always used oral discussions to transmit personal or family histories. Oral conversation was, out of sheer necessity, the primary means I used in my field research. Each of the elders who shared stories with me could say, with the poet Virgil, Cynthius aurem vellit: Apollo plucked my ear. For them, as for the Romans and the blind poet Milton, the ear was the seat of memory. (Apollo, the god of poetic inspiration, would tug a mortal’s ear to remind him to be attentive and remember.) The elders recalled and discussed things that they had learned in one of two ways: through personal experience or from hearing a story and committing it to memory. They were trained from childhood to observe meticulously, to listen carefully, and to remember in detail what they heard and saw. They are the last generation in Palau to learn almost everything they know using only occasional recourse to the written word or artificial images. Their memories were prodigious, and the stories they told fluent and gripping.¹¹

Recording the memories of the people of Peleliu, then comparing them against the background of American and Japanese historiography and memory, is the kind of history telling that Young advocates. This work also includes close study of the objects of commemoration—such material leavings as war monuments, shrines, and relics on Peleliu—to reveal memories of the Japanese and American soldiers and their countrymen and understand the politics of their representations. It considers such physical remains of Palauan life as village sites, farmlands, odesongel, and other olangch to build the background for the oral histories.

The methods employed, then, combine Palauan and Western notions of history. Source material comes from the Palauan tradition of family oral history and from personal observation. I have supplemented it with written records about Palau and with Japanese and American accounts of their colonial periods and the war. To all these I have provided additional commentary and interpretation. My hope is that reducing the islanders’ stories to writing will preserve them but not ossify them, while making the history of the people of Peleliu and Palau available to a wider audience.

The Landscape of Islands

Peleliu is a small island. It has a land area of only 4.78 square miles (12.4 square kilometers). Adding the the shoreline mangrove swamps brings it to 5.73 square miles (14.8 square kilometers).¹² Islands are distinctive for their natural environments. Their smallness and isolation have made many oceanic islands (i.e., those that were never connected to continents, which includes Palau and all of Micronesia) ideal laboratories for understanding the origin, diversification, and extinction of their biota.¹³ Those islands furthest from the sources of colonizing species